They kept moving my desk. From the front row to the back corner, then next to the window, and later, away from the window. I was given a different seat every few months, a new configuration to try to stop me from talking. It never worked. What none of my teachers could figure out was why: I already knew the answers. My talking wasn’t a problem for me. It was a problem for whoever was sitting near me. Nobody had a name yet for the ADHD underneath it. That would come decades later, on top of a childhood already shaped by a handful of genetic conditions I’d been singled out for since I could remember. The desk-moving was just one more adjustment made to manage a kid, instead of a question asked about the room.
That’s the whole difference between the medical model and the social model of neurodivergence, and I lived on the wrong side of it for years before anyone was able to identify either one. The medical model asks: what’s wrong with this child and how do we manage them, so they stop disrupting the room? The social model asks a harder question: what’s actually expected of a mind that talks the way mine does and was the room ever shaped to let that talking go somewhere useful?
Years later, on the other side of the desk — teaching in front of many desks, not sitting at one — the same pattern found me again, just with a different edge. I remember a classroom where the kids simply would not stop singing. I hit a point where the noise stopped registering as noise and started registering as something I had to make stop. I punched a wall. Not my proudest moment, but an honest one: that’s what a nervous system does once it’s been asked to process more than it can filter, for longer than it can hold. I still can’t wear a round-neck shirt without feeling like I can’t breathe. It’s V-neck or nothing for me, otherwise I can’t concentrate on anything else in the room. None of that is a discipline problem. It’s a design problem and the design in question is usually the room, not the person in it.
The admin load nearly finished the job that the noise started. I loved the classroom but drowned in everything around it. Marking all weekend and still being awake at 5am on the Monday morning marks were due meant walking into work carrying the shame of having cut it that close again. But knowing that the shame was coming never once taught me to manage the time better. Shame doesn’t teach that. What I needed was scaffolding, not another reason to feel bad about needing it.
My own room did eventually change, but not because anyone accommodated it. I was never given formal accommodations, not as a student and not as a teacher. I just had to figure it out myself. Many learners get accommodations: extra time, movement breaks, a reader or a scribe — real, important accommodations for real needs. Adults mostly don’t. Once you’re out of a system built to accommodate children, that option quietly disappears, and adapting the system yourself is the only thing left to do. For me, that meant leaving a brick-and-mortar classroom for an online one. My office has a standing desk. Noise-cancelling headphones live on my head so permanently that my team and learners joke that they don’t think I actually have ears under there. Nobody accommodated any of that in. I built it, because nobody was going to build it for me and it changed how I teach more than any seat change at school ever did.
That’s where accommodation quietly falls short of inclusion. Accommodation is another seat by the window, an allowance granted to the exception, while the room itself stays exactly as it was built. Inclusion asks the harder question: what if the room had been built for a range of minds from the start? I spent a school career getting moved around a room that never changed. I’d rather the kids in mine now grow up in a room that did.
